Ryan presents a cruel, radical budget 'vision'

8:41 PM,
Mar. 16, 2013

Written by

E.J.
Dionne

Thanks to this plan, nobody can take the House Budget Committee chairman seriously anymore as a policy wonk or true deficit hawk. His budget is the work of an ideologue. It's a bargaining ploy that even Ryan concedes is merely "a vision."

It is full of holes and magic asterisks, the biggest being his refusal to detail any of the middle-class tax deductions he would have to scrap to get to his 25 percent income tax rate. This would represent an astonishingly large cut from the current 39.6 percent rate for incomes of over $450,000 a ...